Gene Youngblood describes the work of social networking pioneers Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in a lecture February 3, 2012 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In 1980 artists Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway organized Hole in Space, a three-night “public communication sculpture” that unfolded simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles. An enormous two-way video screen was installed in a window of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fischer Hall in New York, while another was installed in a window of the Broadway department store in Century City. Satellite technology transmitted real-time, life-size images of people to each other; participants could see, hear, and speak to someone on the opposite coast with the same immediacy they could to someone physically adjacent. The event had not been publicly announced and no signage existed; it depended initially on chance occurrence and then on word-of-mouth to build an audience, which expanded to such a degree that by the third night, the sculpture was the site for transcontinental family reunions.
